5
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
(from ‘The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot)
6
Houllier targets £13m Cissé.
Gérard Houllier has reacted to Liverpool’s costly
failure to qualify for the Champions’ League by pledging to lure the France
International striker Djibril Cissé. The Liverpool manager is also preparing
to swoop on Blackburn Rovers’ Damien Duff . . .
(from British newspaper,
The Guardian
2003)
7
When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters . . .
(from ‘Horse Latitudes’ by Jim Morrison of rock band
The Doors
)
8
Of course, with the Soviets’
launch of Sputnik, the Americans had been Pearl
Harbored in space.
(Arthur C. Clarke, interviewed in 2001)
9
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
(from
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare)
10
The exercises developed in this sub-unit are more an appetiser than a main
course.
(the first sentence of this sub-unit)
Instructions
A
For each of 1–10, decide whether the example represents metonymy or metaphor.
If you are in doubt, you should apply the ‘simile test’ which was set out in A11.
If you decide an example is metonymy, follow instruction B below; if metaphor,
then follow instruction C. Some examples may well exhibit both tropes, in which
case you will need to follow both A and B in your analysis.
B
Specify which type of associated concept is the vehicle of the metonymy. For
example, is the metonymy based on a part-for-whole relationship,
a location-
for-institution relationship, or on a more contingent ‘one-off ’ connection
between the associated concepts?
C
Specify the source domain and the target domain for the metaphor. Follow this
procedure even if there is more than one metaphor in the example. (Remember,
the same target domain may be mapped through different source domains.)
Referring to material in B11 if necessary, try to
say if the metaphor has been
extended or elaborated in any way.
Metaphor in prose fiction: an example
Now, to the main course. This sub-unit narrows the focus by developing some prac-
tical work around a single passage from prose fiction. The passage is from Jeanette
11
111
11
111
E X P L O R I N G M E T A P H O R S I N D I F F E R E N T K I N D S O F T E X T S
143
Winterson’s novel
Written on the Body
(1993). To say that metaphor features in this
text is somewhat of an understatement (as you will soon see), but the passage offers
an excellent opportunity for a more detailed analysis of metaphorical composition.
Analysis of the passage will also help to consolidate many of the concepts introduced
across this strand, including those relating to novelty, concretisation, and extending
and elaboration in metaphor.
Before you proceed to the Winterson text, read through the following guidelines
which will help give shape to your analysis and interpretation of the passage:
(i) When thinking about metaphor, it is important not to lose sight of the distinc-
tion between source and target domains. It is not uncommon to come across a
target (that is, the concept you are describing through the metaphor) which has
been mapped onto several distinct source domains.
The concept of
LOVE
, for
instance, can form the target domain for a range of source domains, and conven-
tional metaphors with this pattern include
LOVE IS A BATTLE
(‘They’ve been at
each other’s throats for months’),
LOVE IS A JOURNEY
(‘Our relationship is going
nowhere’) or
LOVE IS A NUTRIENT
(‘He’s sustained by her love’) and so on. In
the
analysis of text, it is important to differentiate sets of metaphors which
develop the same target domain from other, unrelated metaphors which develop
different target and source domains.
(ii) Related to (i), a key stylistic question that needs to be addressed concerns the
extent to which the mapping between source and target is novel. That is, is
the mapping conventional (as in the examples provided for
LOVE
above) or are
the mappings striking or unusual in comparison
to what we encounter in day
to day language? Another important question concerns the degree of concreti-
sation, or otherwise, embodied by a metaphor.
Does the mapping go, for
example, from an abstract target to a concrete source domain, or is some other
permutation involved?
(iii) Elaboration and extending are two of a number of techniques for embellishing
metaphors by making new concepts available for mapping. This is especially
common in metaphors containing a broad source domain (involving say, build-
ings, food or economic exchange) because part of the mental representation for
that domain includes entries for various
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
